Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  Given that the American-backed puppets did not perform well, it would have seemed reasonable to believe that the delay was a result of a downward “revision” of the results so that the al-Sistani list did not get an outright majority. Yet in this atmosphere of high tension, the al-Sistani list remained surprisingly – even unnaturally – quiet. One cannot help but wonder how much this has to do with the possible unreliability of what passes for standard demographic numbers in modern Iraq. A senior Sunni official, Fakhri al-Qaisi, a Baghdad dentist, longstanding member of conservative Islamic groups, and secretary-general of the National Dialogue Council, doesn't accept the standard “Iraq is 60% Shiite” line. As a recent New York Times piece put it, he contests

  even the demographics that suggest that any majority-rule government in Iraq will have to be led by Shiites. He argues that Shiites, generally considered to be about 60 percent of the population, are actually about half that, and Sunni Arabs closer to 40 percent than 20 percent, as most Iraqi studies have suggested.2

  The Uncertain and Unstable Future

  At the end of the day the process has crisis built into it, notwithstanding the questions regarding the election's legitimacy, integrity, and regularity. Why? Because the Bremer-imposed “Transitional Administrative Law” for formulating the new constitution declares that it can be accepted definitively only if fewer than three of Iraq's eighteen provinces reject it by a majority. Some have called this the “Kurdish veto,” because they are the majority in three provinces. It could also be called the Sunni veto because they are the majority in at least three if not four provinces.3 A relatively recent report has indicated that both Shiites and Sunnis are interested in having the law changed by the parliament, but the “TAL itself states that it can only be amended by a three-quarters vote in Parliament, which the Kurds, with more than a quarter of the seats, would be expected to block.”4

  One seems justified in asking whether this framework was a product of venality or stupidity on the part of Bremer and the Bush administration. In other words, were these “vetoes” built in deliberately by the U.S. in order to guarantee permanent constitutional crisis, for exploitation by American interests, or were they the product of the lack of foresight that this administration has demonstrated in so many other fields? In the abstract, a decent case could be made for both possibilities.

  Meanwhile, a Successful Demonstration

  The de facto American government in Iraq seems to have got what it wanted with the January 30 election. The election was billed as a “success” simply because a certain undetermined number of people participated. The whole thing was predictable, and it was in fact predicted with stunning precision by one of the world's most informed Middle East reporters, Robert Fisk:

  Yes, I know how it's all going to be played out. Iraqis bravely vote despite the bloodcurdling threats of the enemies of democracy. At last, the U.S. and British policies have reached fruition. A real and functioning democracy will be in place so the occupiers can leave soon. Or next year. Or in a decade or so. Merely to hold these elections – an act of folly in the eyes of so many Iraqis – will be a “success.”1

  The accuracy of Fisk's prediction was chronicled by, among others, Naomi Klein, writing for The Nation just 11 days after the election. “January 30, we are told, was not about what Iraqis were voting for,” she noted.

  [I]t was about the fact of their voting and, more important, how their plucky courage made Americans feel about their war. Apparently, the election's true purpose was to prove to Americans that, as George Bush put it, “the Iraqi people value their own liberty.” Stunningly, this appears to come as news. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown said the vote was “the first clear sign that freedom really may mean something to the Iraqi people.” On The Daily Show, CNN's Anderson Cooper described it as “the first time we've sort of had a gauge of whether or not they're willing to sort of step forward and do stuff.”2

  That the popular resistance movement and a tens of thousands-strong protest of American occupation don't qualify, for the American media, as the Iraqis “doing stuff” in defense of their own liberty and destiny is a testament to how well the election was packaged by those who orchestrated it. Clearly the idea that a free and independent people might reasonably reject a canned democratic process that is funded, organized, and enforced by American political and military might is not something that resonates with mainstream pundits. It is also a concept that is anathema to U.S. politicians, because the conceptual approach to the election has been designed to pit those who resist the occupation and the electoral process it created – the “terrorists,” “dead-enders,” and “former regime elements” – against those who submit to the U.S.-driven process and therefore prove that they “value their own freedom.” Of all commentators, Frank Brodhead most convincingly sketched – 9 days in advance – how this dynamic works.

  [T]he dramatic tension of the January 30 election will focus on voter turnout. The U.S. mass media has already established this framing of the issue, and the election-day spectacle will pit the desire of the Iraqi people to vote vs. the violence of rebels opposed to democracy. Few of the long-term or background elements of a truly free election will receive any media play, and the idea that a free election is incompatible with U.S. military occupation will be completely off the agenda. That violence keeps many people from the polls, that many polling places will not be functioning, and that election officials, candidates, and even voters will be attacked by opponents of the U.S. occupation will be important preoccupations of the U.S. media on election day. (Anticipating these obvious problems, the United States has been taking steps to increase voter turnout – same-day registration, allowing voting at any polling place, allowing voting by Iraqis abroad, etc. – while at the same time trying to low-ball expectations of a strong voter turnout.) …

  … the net effect of mass media coverage will be to frame the January 30 election to Bush's advantage, and to the advantage of continued U.S. military occupation. However flawed the election-day events, the media will accept the Bush administration's claim that its intention is to bring democracy to Iraqi, and that rebel violence shows that it is democracy itself that opponents of the U.S. occupation most fear.1

  For the uncritical public eye, the election validated the political landscape engineered by the U.S. and demonstrated the continued need for American occupation to defend “freedom” and keep the democratic train on track. For the U.S., that train is a convenient vicious cycle; others would call it a train wreck. James Carroll noted in an article for the Boston Globe called “Train Wreck of an Election,” how the intimate link between the electoral process, and the government it produced, on the one hand, and the occupation which maintains that government in power, on the other, results plainly in continued – perhaps indefinite? – occupation.

  The chaos of a destroyed society leaves every new instrument of governance dependent on the American force, even as the American force shows itself incapable of defending against, much less defeating, the suicide legions. The irony is exquisite. The worse the violence gets, the longer the Americans will claim the right to stay.2

  By that standard, assuming what Herman and Brodhead stated is true – that the purpose of a “demonstration election” is “to legitimize an invasion and occupation” – the January 30 Iraqi vote was a resounding success. Some even characterized the election as an outright “referendum in favor of peaceful politics,”3 as if those who didn't vote were effectively voting against peace. It is perhaps not coincidental, however, that the journalist responsible for that description is an anti-Ba'athist, London-based Iraqi Kurd, for it is almost exclusively those like him who, having opposed the “old regime,” now see something positive in the “demonstration” that cloaked its overthrow with legitimacy.

  The Facts on the Ground

  The PR success that was the election doesn't for one minute alter the reality of the situation in Iraq. The country's real government, as Eric Margolis put it, “wil
l continue to be the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the world's largest, and 150,000 occupation troops.”1 Recent calls from the new Iraqi “Transitional Government” for “more support and mediation” only serve to illustrate the dependence of the “liberated” Iraqi formeropposition groups upon Uncle Sam for help in policing the dysfunctional democracy that the “liberation” created.2 American fears that heavy intervention in Iraq's post-election political arena would give the impression “that Iraqi government leaders were not acting independently” have since given way to a “new approach” that “[presses] hard for Iraq to move ahead.”3As described by the Los Angeles Times, that new approach almost seemed dismissive of concerns that the Iraqis would seem insufficiently independent: while the Iraqis are “the ultimate determinants of their own destiny,” a U.S. official was quoted as saying, “we have 140,000 troops here, and they are getting shot at” (emphasis mine). Ironically, the only time the new Iraqi “government” seems to flex its muscle vis-à-vis the U.S. is when the Americans suggest that a compromise on their anti-Ba'athist line – maintained by the dominant al-Dawa and SCIRI factions – might help reach out to the Ba'athist and Sunni leaders of the insurgency and encourage them to participate in the new Iraqi government. “This is not the business of the U.S.,” a spokesman for al-Jaafari (now Prime Minister in the Transitional Government) said recently in response to such a suggestion. Many Iraqis also point to the intransigence of SCIRI leader al-Hakim (along with that of his Badr deputy, Hadi al-Amri4) as an obstacle to the Iraqi government's ever extending a welcome to Sunni and Ba'athist elements.1 The message would seem to be that the “new” Iraq is more than willing to follow America's lead, provided that lead does not dilute the newfound authority of those who, up until a couple of years ago, were defined by their opposition to the “former” Iraqi government. But transitional government has ultimately little to fear from American pressure as far as the “former regime” and the now disenfranchised Ba'athist organization are concerned. For the U.S. has made perfectly clear that there are certain “red lines” that its “partner” government in Iraq (as the L.A. Times tellingly put it) cannot cross. “The U.S. insists,” the paper reported, “that the Iraqi government be democratic and that the country be pluralistic …,”2 according to an American official. “We constantly remind them that we're working toward the same goal” (emphasis mine), he also said.

  As for those who maintain that the occupation will end when the Iraqi “security forces” can handle things on their own, it is hard not to question what resistance the Iraqi forces would have to oppose after the withdrawal of U.S. forces, since it is the latter's presence which is largely admitted as fueling the insurgency in the first place. This leads one to wonder whether the occupation will ever, in fact, end. Alternatively, the training and restructuring of the Iraqi “security array” by the American military training apparatus – which latest reports have as comprising 160,000 men (of, not insignificantly, mostly Shiite or Kurdish background3) funded by the U.S. at a cost of $5.7 billion,4 and which includes “the national police force, … military units such as the Iraqi army, the Iraqi National Guard, the Iraqi Prevention Force and Iraqi Special Operations Forces, and policetype units such as the Department of Border Enforcement and the Facilities Protection Service”1 – may be simply another element of the American plan to reshape Iraq along U.S.-dictated lines: the element which in fact puts the mechanism to enforce that plan firmly in place.

  Meanwhile, the January 30 election provided an entry point into the U.S.-created, post-“regime change” political landscape for the likes of al-Jaafari, Jalal Talabani, leader of the PUK (and now President), and the SCIRI leaders al-Hakim and al-Amri (respectively head of SCIRI and Badr), all of whom made names for themselves by fighting the legitimate government of Saddam Hussein over many years, with varying levels of support from Israel, Iran, and the U.S.2

  By supporting those who opposed the now deposed Baghdad government and its network of popular Ba'athist, nationalist support, the U.S. has painted itself into an awful corner in Iraq, automatically cutting out of the political process any Iraqis who don't happen to support those formerly “opposition” parties. In fact they become borderline enemies of the (new) state and even possible targets for U.S. “counter-insurgency” forces. The fact remains, however, that the so-called “Iraqi forces” and “Iraqi government” sponsored and supported by the U.S. were imagined, not long ago, by a considerable number of Iraqis to be precisely the opposite: anti-Iraqi. Few touting the “new Iraq” remember the suspicion with which both SCIRI and al-Dawa are regarded by many Iraqis due to the role that both groups have played in Iraq's recent history as both destabilizing forces and agents of foreign powers. Illustrating the relationship between Iran, for instance, and the groups now controlling Iraq is a May 2005 visit there of Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, whose welcome by al-Jaafari and other “top” Iraqi Shiites was “suffused with references to the ties they formed during years of exile in Iran after fleeing the repression of Saddam Hussein.”3 Also illustrative was the early 2005 campaign of Hadi al-Amri, the head of the Badr wing of SCIRI (now a self-professed “political” organization, following the January 2005 election, though formerly, and some say still, SCIRI's Iran-trained militia) for the post of interior minister of the Transitional Government. His bid for the position recalled memories – bad memories, for many – of the Badr Brigade's role in the Iran-Iraq war when it fought on the side of Iraq's enemy.1 Though al-Amri didn't get the post, it sparked coverage in the press of Badr's alleged responsibility for torturing numerous Iraqi POWs during the Iran-Iraq war, with the intention of coercing them into joining Badr and fighting against Iraq.2Ironically, al-Amri maintains (according to AFP) that he was a “resistance” fighter and that, though he “could have stayed in Iraq, surrendered to the Ba'ath regime, and lived like an ordinary person” (one wonders how, given Hussein's alleged butchery), he remained “true to the resistance.” Evidently, some resistance movements are acceptable to Iraq's new ruling coalition.

  As if the U.S. embrace of pro-Iranian Shiite factions weren't enough to distance it from the rank and file of the Iraqi population, it has taken the same stance towards Kurdish separatists. U.S. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's visit to Iraqi Kurdistan on April 12, 2005, highlighted the attachment of the U.S. to Kurdish figures who led the effort to overthrow Baghdad's formerly recognized government. Rumsfeld, in his remarks, highlighted his opportunity

  to thank the Kurdish people and their leadership for the stalwart support over the many years now, and for their important role in liberating the Iraqi people from the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein.3

  While Talabani, al-Jaafari, and his al-Dawa and SCIRI supporters now represent “acceptable” politics, still missing is what was marginalized by both the election and the process of “de-Ba'athification”: the idea of a non-sectarian, nationalist Iraq held together by a vision other than ethnicity or religion.4 The jockeying for power and position in the new “government” of Iraq might have been unseemly, but it was a wholly predictable outcome of the unleashing of destabilizing and sectarian forces in Iraq. What now seems to be the keynote of the new Iraqi politics is the pre-eminence of ethnic and religious concerns to the exclusion of an “Iraqi” vision.

  Journalist Mark Danner called the election an “ethnic census,”1 while Zogby pollsters characterized voting as “sectarian,”

  with Shiites voting for control of the government, and Kurds voting as an expression of their autonomy, the Sunni Arab failure to vote as a function not only of threats, but a clear expression of their growing sense of disenfranchisement.2

  Concerns that currently predominate are similar, as indicated in the interesting Knight Ridder report we have already cited.

  Shiite politicians will be under pressure from devout voters to enforce religious tenets and laws. Local officials who now control Iraq's heavily Shiite southern and central cities already have added traditional Islamic rules to secular laws governing
public conduct there ….

  These moves have alienated Kurdish and Sunni voters and could fuel secession efforts that could split Iraq into three countries; a Kurdish state in the north, a Sunni one in the middle and a Shiite one to the south, said Jordanian political analyst Labib Kamhawi.

  Oil revenue is another point of contention.

  More than anything, Iraq's neighbors fear a civil war and a breakup of the country.3

  These ethnic, religious, and territorial passions “can no longer be papered over,” as John Burns warned in his April 29 piece for the New York Times. What lies ahead is “the hardest passage yet in the American enterprise in Iraq” (note he rightly calls the enterprise “American”), with issues hanging in the balance that are “basic to Iraq's future and its prospects of emerging as a stable democracy.” At worst, what must be avoided is “civil war among Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds.”4

  While much is made in the press of the potential for “civil war,” it shouldn't be forgotten that one is already underway between Iraqis fighting for their right to self-determination and those collaborating with foreign occupation. This situation places the U.S. in the position, whether it likes it or not, of actively (and militarily) opposing the desires of many Iraqis, while working with those who have long sought (for whatever reason) to capture the reins of power in Baghdad. The internecine struggle between the Kurdish leaders Barzani and Talabani1 is simply one illustration of the ongoing “power plays,” as is the violence provoked by SCIRI reprisals against Sunni clerics, under the auspices of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, for their alleged support of the resistance movement,2 all of which the U.S. is forced to take cognizance of as a result of its having sponsored the truly sectarian “opposition groups” as part of its effort to reshape Iraq. The obligation of U.S. Navy special operations forces to protect Transitional Prime Minister al-Jaafari from attack 24 hours a day3 is perhaps an apt metaphor illustrating the larger task that the U.S. has signed itself up for.